


For what it's worth

by GufettoGrigio



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, Not Steve Friendly, because Tony and overworking, though maybe not the best way to handle it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 05:46:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16738246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GufettoGrigio/pseuds/GufettoGrigio
Summary: Would you have given it to him? - Tony finds himself suddenly asking to the empty lab - Dad, would you have given him the shield if you had known he would use it to try and kill me?He hates that he can't 100% convince himself Howard wouldn’t have.





	For what it's worth

After Siberia Tony is _busy._ Busy trying to set up accounts and funds and trusts to contain at least the economical damage caused by the Civil War, busy with press conferences and trials and paperwork. Busy with lawyers and engineers and government agents and the UN.

(Busy trying to find a bone donor to replace his sternum, busy trying to schedule his lung surgery, busy trying not to curl up in a ball and cry in desperation because sometimes he forgets that he can, in fact, still _breathe_.)

But, most of all, Tony is busy working.

Because the truth is: when Tony feels scared, he works. When he feels petty, he works. When he is sad or lonely or miserable, he works. Which, given his current reality, means he works _everyday_.

(If he feels like trashing the lab every time he steps in it, it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares and nobody needs to know.)

_____

 

It’s his fear that leads him to Dr. Erskine’s notes - what few pages are left of them. Because yes, they were classified SHIELD files before _someone_ uploaded them onto the internet. Now, the world has them. Tony has them. Together with his father’s.

It’s his fear that leads him to leave technology and take a dive into chemistry and biology. Because he is human but so was Steve. So _is_ Steve.

When he finally has a vial of stereotypically neon blu liquid in his hands and a new record for smallest number of hours slept in a month, Tony finds himself laughing.

Hysterically.

Until he hyperventilates and triggers himself into a panic attack.

Because what the fuck, Rogers?! That bullshit about not messing with technology and leaving stuff alone? Well, it’s rich coming from the chemically engineered super-soldier. The weapon to end the war, to exterminate the Germans.

Tony remembers a conversation, their very first: “Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, _what are you?_ ”

Tony had replied the truth: Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.

What he should have asked instead is: without this vial - which you had no hand in creating but that _my father_ and Dr Erskine made for you - what are _you_?

Because Tony Stark is Iron Man with or without the suit. Aldrich Killian taught him that much.

(Tony still struggles to convince himself of that on his best days, words of disapproval echoing in his thoughts always: “I know guys with none of that worth ten of you.”)

So he grits his teeth, holding up the vial.

Steve Rogers, what are you without your chemically gifted muscles?

 

(Tony wakes up the following day, drenched in sweat and feeling like he is going to throw up, and realizes that he could never use the antidote. Not on Steve. Because, even with his sternum still fragile and the chest brace cutting his breath in a constant reminder of what it felt like not to have air in his lungs, he does not wish this kind of pain on Steve.

Tony knows what it’s like to be helpless, to be weak. He won’t take Steve back to that. Also, Tony is not sure he wants to know what Steve Rogers is without Captain America. Tony Stark without Iron Man is already sorry enough.

So Tony ends up only keeping one vial, should Barnes ever want a normal, human-sized life. All the others he destroys, both the serum ones and those for the antidote.)

_____

 

It’s pettiness that hits him the following week, when his eyes fall on the flip phone for the 200th time and it still _hurts_ like the first.

Chemistry seems to have become his new field of interest. Tony pours over academic articles, youtube videos and lab reports for days. It’s an ungrateful job and Tony remembers more and more why he likes computers. Hardware and software? You can see the progress. You can hold a suit. It’s rewarding. Chemical reactions? Not so much.

Still, there is something satisfying in hearing the hiss of metal sizzling and contorting. It soothes some deep part of him - some instinctive fear, there, at the back of his mind - one that Tony will never admit to having. And when the simmering and hissing and bending gets cruel enough, when it gets more to a kind of boiling, screeching and dissolving level...well, Tony feels bad because he can’t imagine what it would do to _flesh_ but he also can’t help but feel _better_ : should Steve ever try anything again, he’ll get what he _deserves_.

 

(Rhodes walks - _wobbles_ \- in while he is busy finding a way to shoot acid filled bullets. He takes a look at the metal plate Tony has all but dissolved and frowns with a sadness that makes Tony sick. He never wanted to put it there.

“Tones, what are you doing? What is this madness that you have been working on for” - he checks his watch - “twelve days and heaven knows how many hours?”

And Tony does not know how to answer. I made an acid that can go through vibranium? Because I want to get back at Steve? Yeah, that’s just as good as it sounds. The press is right: Tony is childish.

So he just shuts his mouth and asks Rhodey to help him chuck everything away.

When they get to the shield, Tony panics and Rhodey - God bless him - shoves the damn thing in a corner and rushes to him. It’s the first night they have dinner together since Siberia.)

_____

 

It takes a year for the realization to hit Tony and when it does it hits him all at once, out of the blue, one day when he is down in the lab.

In an effort to avoid DUMM-E dusting him along with some short-circuited electronics belonging to Spider-man’s new suit, Tony ducs out of the bot’s way and his eye falls on the shield resting in a forgotten corner of the lab. And he surprises himself when, for the first time since Siberia, his reaction is not anger or panic. Instead, he looks at the shield and asks himself when did that piece of metal become so important.

It’s because it’s unique, of course. It’s Captain America’s shield and Tony would not even know how to make another one like that. He knows how to destroy it, not replicate it. The shield is not Tony’s. It is, in fact, the only Avenger weapon Tony did not create.

The shield is _Howard’s_.

The question comes in his mind unbidden, the previously unvoiced doubt of countless sleepless nights. _Would you have given it to him?_ \- Tony finds himself suddenly asking aloud to the empty room - _Dad, would you have given it to him if you had known he would one day use it to try and kill me?_

He hates that he was never able to 100% convince himself Howard wouldn’t. Howard who went flying in the night by himself, abandoning his wife, ignoring Aunt Peggy, all to search for Steve Rogers.

_For Captain America._

The hero.

The flawless man.

The man Tony cannot compare with.

Yet, Tony now looks at the shield and there are other words echoing in his mind: _What is and always will be my greatest creation, is you._

Tony remembers holding the holographic atom in his hand and thanking his dad for it, with a fondness that he had not felt since he had found out that the man had killed his mum with his drunken driving. When he had later fleetingly thought of the sentiment, he had put it up to “at least he is saving me.” _At least I was not completely wrong in thinking that he cared._

Now the truth is different though, isn’t it? It’s no longer just his mother that died that night.

It was not just her that Tony lost.

It was his father too.

It would be easier if Tony meant it in terms of his life only but he doesn’t. He can’t. It was not just his father’s life and presence he lost but his memory too. Their relationship. Everything.

There isn’t a single day gone by in which Tony hasn’t missed his mother and hated his father. The grief and the blame have tainted the memory of every interaction Tony ever had with his dad - with the man he believed murdered his mum. The guilt, that followed too. Every time he thought of Howard with love, with fondness, Tony would suddenly catch himself on the fact that the man was a murderer, that loving him meant disrespecting his mother. Why does it still surprise people that Tony is as fucked up in the head as he is?

Finding the atom had been the beginning. Tony had hoped then that even if he never could _reconcile_ with his dad, at least he could _make peace_ with the fact that the man was not the evil to end all evil, as Tony’s grief liked to picture him. What the hell, Tony is the last person who should pass a judgement on moral greyness.

What he found in Siberia has changed that. Barnes has changed that.

Seeing the video felt like losing his mother all over. _Agony_ doesn’t even begin to cover how that felt. It was the one pain he had voiced, back then. The one that had him lash out, his mind still reeling from having his trust shattered, his world turned upside down. It wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t the only reason.

Tony means it when he says his world turned upside down. In the space of less than a minute he lost his mother all over, his childhood hero and friend turnd into a backstabbing villain and he _found_ his father again. That last one should be good, shouldn’t it? Well, for Tony it hurt just as bad as the first one. It’s not a relief to find that he didn’t have to try and force himself to hate the man. That he didn’t have to forgive him for a murder. That he could let go of at least _that_ guilt, after spending years drowning in it. It’s not rage, it’s not pain, it’s just...nothing. It’s emptiness. Tony feels like somebody dug into his being and hollowed him out. And that _hurts._

He looks at the shield, there on the floor of his lab, abandoned on the ground just like Steve left it.

 _You don’t deserve it_ \- he had said to Steve in Siberia and Tony himself had thought he meant the shield. Now, though...now he is pretty sure a part of him meant: _It’s my father you don’t deserve_.

My father who was your friend.

My father who was maybe even more of a genius than I am.

_Dead almost 20 years and still taking me to school._

My father who _still_ couldn’t even compare. Whose death was not enough for you to even acknowledge.

So now Tony looks at the shield and thinks: if Howard who was better than me was not enough for you, what does it take to be?

The answer is glaringly clear: whatever it takes, Tony does not have it.

Tony lets himself kneel on the floor, curling in on himself and cries. He is not enough. He never was and never will be. It is his worst nightmare, his deepest fear coming to life. And yet it tastes so much like absolution.

_____

 

When the Ex-Vengers (or whatever it is that the press is calling them nowadays) are finally reinstated, Tony greets them like he normally would.

He does not ask for distance, he does not ask to be addressed by surname or title, he does not stop improving their weapons. But he does not back down from his lines either. He does not apologize unless it is due, he does not try to justify himself because there should be no need for it, he _does_ keep in two or three back-doors to all of the weapons because they are _his_. It is paradoxically more of a slap in the face than any screaming would have been. Tony knows where he stands now and it is more valuable than anything else in the face of their confusion.

When Steve comes to him - once the (literal) dust of the Thanos mess is more or less settled - and says ‘we need to talk’, Tony easily accepts.

Steve talks of the Accords, of Bucky, of HYDRA. He talks of Tony’s mistakes with Ultron and Wanda’s parents, of it not being personal, of rebuilding trust and what-not. Tony listens then shakes his head and asks:

“How long had you known my father for?”

“Years, Tony...why? I already told you it wasn’t Bucky…”

Tony cuts him short. “Did you consider him a friend?”

“I did, of course I did! Just like you are!”

“Then answer me this: did you wish me dead? In Siberia. Did you wish me dead?”

Steve stares at him, startled like the notion makes no sense to him.

“What!? Of course not Tony! I was just…”

“Doing what was necessary, I know. So, if you did not actively wish me dead, the only answer I find to your behavior is that I simply was not worth enough. You saw the footage of my father - of a man who came to look for you even when everybody else thought you were lost to the ice, a man _you_ say was a friend - you saw him die but all you cared about was Bucky. He was your friend and you didn’t care. My father’s life - and death - were worth nothing in your eyes. My life or death was worth nothing. If I lived in Siberia, be it. If I died, be it. It did not matter. You left me behind. Bucky was more. Wanda was more. What my father did for you was thrown back at me, worthless. Even Red Skull was worth more, at least he was worth killing.”

Now Steve is actually gaping at him, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. It’s not the expression of somebody who believes Tony is talking bullshit but it’s also not the expression of somebody who understands. Steve Rogers still thinks that he is right. Tony forces himself to take a breath before he looks up into those eyes that have plagued his childhood dreams and adult nightmares.

“The irreconcilable difference between us is not in the Accords, is not in how we see Bucky’s involvement in my parents murder or in my faults with Ultron. The difference is that I think I am worth something. Or at least something more. Much more. I’ll admit I had a hard time getting there but getting my father back helped.”

Tony shakes his head.

“So no, Steve. I will not trust you with my life or well-being ever again because you simply do not care for them….and for the sake of this world, I hope I am the exception.”

**Author's Note:**

> Well, what can I say? I have been sitting on this piece for ages. I wrote the beginning in a fit of rage and the middle in tears because I love Tony, as flawed a character as he is, and he does deserve better.  
> I don’t believe that Steve is wrong in some of his positions but I find him not recognizing that there are necessarily moral flaws, or at least moral dilemmas, in many situations just white-hot rage kind of upsetting. Has nobody ever put him in front of the train problem? An euthanasia debate? Animal testing? Democracy and supremacy? Any controversial issues? Anyway, it’s better if I don’t get started. I decided to post this just because I watched Infinity War again and every time Steve said “We don’t trade lives” I felt like punching the screen. I am a very mature adult and I am putting my “debate and disagreement are fundamental for development” philosophy degree to good practice, aren’t I?
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed, leave a review if you did (and even if you didn’t.) Catch any mistakes, let me know! Comments are the fuel for my writer soul!


End file.
